Why this word is great
ESTRANGE — [Verb] To cause someone to feel less close or friendly, often resulting in alienation or a cessation of contact, especially within a family. From Middle English, from Anglo-French estrangir, estranger, from Old French estranger ("to treat as a stranger"), from Vulgar Latin *extraneare, from Latin extraneus ("foreign, stranger"). Unlike "alienate," which implies a deliberate turning of affection into active hostility, or "distance," which suggests a neutral, often temporary withdrawal, to estrange is to render the familiar foreign, a slow uncoupling of shared history. It is the accumulating silence between two place settings at a holiday table, the shared photograph that accrues the quality of an artifact from a lost civilization, and the childhood bedroom that feels like a museum exhibit of a stranger's life—the quiet, geological shift by which love becomes archaeology.